HOSPITALITY firms are being encouraged to increase their Covid-19 testing efforts after "a number" of outbreaks within the industry.

Speaking at Thursday's health and wellbeing board meeting, Dorset's director of public health, Sam Crowe, said cases were rising across the county.

But he said there was evidence vaccines were limiting the impact of this, with just three people in hospital due to the coronavirus.

Giving an update on the situation in the county, Mr Crowe said the situation had changed “quite quickly” in recent weeks from the infection trends seen in recent months.

The infection rate in the BCP Council area is back up above 60 cases per 100,000 compared to a steady level of less than 25 seen since March.

Speaking at Thursday's health and wellbeing board meeting, he said this was expected to continue to increase.

"The South West always lags behind the rest of England in terms of infection rates elsewhere," he said. "In the past couple of weeks, rates have risen in both council areas and we'd expect them to rise over the next few days, given what we're seeing coming through our local information systems."

He said modelling had predicted the increase in cases as the lockdown eased and welcomed the pause in the continued easing of restrictions, saying it was "sensible" to allow the vaccination roll-out to continue.

He said the priority was now on continuing to encourage people, particularly the younger age groups, to have their jabs and to work with employers to boost testing numbers.

Concern is now mainly focused on the hospitality industry within which, he said, there had been "a number of outbreaks" of the coronavirus and that it was "quite clear" many companies were not regularly testing.

But he added that this wave of infections had a "very much weakened" link to hospital admissions compared to previous ones with only three people in hospital.

He said this situation would be kept under review.

The meeting also heard that many GP surgeries in the county were already vaccinating people as young as 18 but that it was "getting more difficult" to encourage younger people to have their jab.